Hitman 3 ray tracing arrives, kills performance, escapes in nice suit

rockpapershotgun.com:

As promised, Hitman 3 now has ray tracing support, added in a new patch alongside Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR 1.0 upscaling capabilities. It’s no lightweight implementation either, combining both ray traced reflections and sun shadows that can really spruce up the game’s already-gleaming murder sandboxes. It’ll please shiny floor enthusiast Katharine, put it that way.

Less pleasing is ray tracing’s performance cost. I gave the patch a quick rundown on an RTX 2080 Ti and Intel Core i5-12600K, by no means a creaking geriatric of a PC, but enabling both settings at 1440p cut average FPS by about 73%. That’s down from 141fps in the built-in Dubai benchmark to just 38fps, both using Ultra quality for the rest of the settings. I wouldn’t advise approaching Hitman 3’s ray tracing without one of the best graphics cards, if it gives even the RTX 2080 Ti this much trouble.

Then again, the additions of DLSS and FSR can absorb some performance impact by rendering at a lower-than-native resolution. With DLSS on its highest Quality setting, that 38fps result became 61fps, while FSR on Ultra Quality produced 54fps. In both cases, the upscaled image was close enough to native 1440p, though DLSS looked sharper and less processed (as well as running faster).

Upscaling is essential if you want ray tracing at 4K, too. At this res, the RTX 2080 Ti averaged 78fps without ray tracing, but collapsed to 19fps with both ray traced reflections and sun shadows: a drop of 76%. Quality-level DLSS got this back to a playable 34fps, though on its respective Ultra Quality setting, FSR could only manage 28fps. It took a further drop down to its Quality setting to eke out 35fps.

Mind you, there's no denying the prettiness of in Hitman 3. Besides the